A puzzle, a frustration and a disappointment … Sonny Mallhi’s non-scary movie Anguish is all this, and not much more. (No relation to Bigas Luna’s 1987 cult classic Anguish, incidentally.) Yet in technical terms it is not badly made by any stretch. It’s just that there is a fatal generic uncertainty about what the film is trying to do. It offers neither honest supernatural chills nor real-world psychological insights: just a muddle.
The film begins with that traditionally dodgy claim of being inspired by true events, which should really be tested by a documentary. Ryan Simpkins plays Tess, a moody teenager living with Jessica (Annika Marks), who is effectively a single mom, as her partner, Tess’s dad, is away in the army, so they communicate via Skype. Tess is on medication for depression, a condition that worsens markedly as she appears to conceive a delusional obsession with another teenager, Lucy (Amberley Gridley), who was killed in the neighbourhood in a car accident. Or is she literally becoming possessed by Lucy’s spirit?
We get a fair bit of indie-aimless drifting, with some hokey jump-scares weirdly bolted on, borrowed from Carrie and The Exorcist. The purely realist aspect of the film is quite well composed but it leads nowhere at all.
